Martin Martin’s On the Other Side
MARTIN MARTIN’S ON THE OTHER SIDE is Mark Wernham’s stunning first novel: an adventure story that takes place simultaneously in multiple dimensions and in multiple voices. Our hero – Jensen Interceptor – is a self-medicating naïf from the future whose life is turned upside down by the whirls and currents of times past, and as he himself trips back and forth in time. This is also the story of the ghost of a murdered WWII soldier, Emile Henderson, who wreaks cataclysmic havoc in present-day London and simultaneously in Jensen’s future world, initially by breaking into the mind of a bit-part TV psychic, Martin Martin.
Jensen’s voice is a shock and a joy – a crazed, jerky idiolect that is as unexpectedly endearing as it is totally original. The novel also incorporates other shards of “found” narrative: transcripts of court hearings, and of broadcast TV programmes, extracts from books, sections of memoir. MARTIN MARTIN’S ON THE OTHER SIDE is, in other words, an extraordinary, genre-busting debut: you won’t have read anything quite like it before.
"A dark, brilliant satire from a maverick new talent who clearly has a lot to say about these interesting times we live in" - The Guardian
"Futuristic dystopias are two a penny, but this one, narrated by Jensen Interceptor, a Government spy in a Big Brother Britain, is a cut above average... impressively macabre" - Mail on Sunday
"Very funny with some Serious Points to boot" - The Word Magazine
"Compellingly narrated by the ace government spy Jensen Interceptor, this excellent dystopian debut novel fuses elements of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, in its parallel universe vernacular and 1984, with its prime ministerial dictatorship of Unity and Success." - David Stubbs, Arena
"Wernham has written a mix of dystopia and supernatural fantasy that’s packed with a lot of anger at where modern-day British politics could take us… plenty of challenging material." - SFX Magazine
"Look away now, Mark Wernham has seen the future, and it’s stupid." - Jonathan Gibbs, Independent
"A brisk dystopian satire that lifts more from Bergess’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE than it borrow from Orwell’s 1984." - Starburst
"…One of 2008’s most memorable fictional creations… A bold, bravura display of pedal-to-the-metal writing… Jensen Interceptor is a hilarious one-off, at once crass, naïve, charming, foul-mouthed, stupid, lovestruck and resilient." - Booktrust
"Utterly insane... Wernham is full of ideas, and the completely mad plot pulls together nicely" - Observer